Professional Guidance

As we continue our evaluation of several important community issues needing further study and discussion we decided to seek the help and guidance of a professional in the field. Fortunately a good friend of the Abbey living in Rochester has agreed to assist us. The founder and president of Priority Thinking, Peter DeMarco, brings to the table not only his expertise in our areas of study but established sound priorities in keeping with the best of Christian philosophy as well.

Peter has a bachelor’s degree from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a masters degree from the University of Southern California, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester. He is also an adjunct professor of ethics in the Department of Philosophy at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY.

He has had a few preliminary meetings with various committees of the community and this past Friday met with the whole community introducing himself and outlining his approach to helping us proceed on the community level. A high point of the meeting was his use of a Power Point presentation of his proprietary Ethics Poll Core Survey, a handy tool for polling the community’s position on some of the questions under consideration.

Visitation

Tomorrow our Father Immediate, Dom Elias Dietz, Abbot of our Mother House, Gethsemani, will arrive to conduct the regular visitation of the community as mandated by the Order’s Constitutions. Most likely he will open the visitation before Compline Monday and during the week he will interview each member of the community, make a presentation of his findings to the community and send a report to the next General Chapter. This an excellent opportunity for a communal ‘review of life’ to help us in our journey along the narrow way that leads to life (Mt.7:14).

Maybe This Week

Tuesday of this week, Chris Bemis, our web site technician with Sojourners Web Studio will come to give us a training session on the workings of our renewed web site. If all goes well and there are no major glitches the remodeled site will most likely be launched at that time. It so happens that August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration, marks the 19th anniversary of the launching of our original site. By the way, the URL of the renewed site remains the same.

Lectio Notebook

Jesus’ great commandment As I have loved you, that you also love one another (Jn 13:34), established the pattern for every other commandment. This is why obeying Jesus and becoming like Jesus are one and the same thing.

Because Jesus reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature (Heb 1:3), to become similar to Jesus is to grow in the pattern of the divine nature itself. In any event, how could Jesus propose to us any model of being and behavior other than the one God himself has proposed to us This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased, said the Father to the disciples on Tabor; listen to him (7:5.